Bruce Joshua Miller

This is a wonderful book about the many, often surprising, definitions and uses of a single word: research. I've used individual chapters in first-year comp class to broaden students understanding of what research can be, but also to allow them to see many of the fundamental characteristics of any kind of research: perpetual uncertainty, a need to be flexible, a tolerance for dead ends and false starts, but above all curiosity. Many of my students have been astonished by the length of time these research processes required--years in many cases--accustomed as they are to the idea that "research" equals instant answers. The only really disappointing chapter here is the one by the crime novelist which is purely descriptive with little analysis (and so many questions that could have been asked). The standouts are "Stay as Long as You Like," about the making of the film Sweet Land, "To Understand You Must Break In" describing a life's worth of experience necessary to write the novel Morkham's Quarry, "Dating Albert Einstein," a fascinating investigation into something I thought we had always known, when exactly Einstein came up with the theory of relativity, and "Curious Encounters in My Search for Vinland" about the conflicted US racial politics underlying the claim that Vikings settled the New World before anyone else.… (mer)